Author’s Note –  This is from another wonderful Bonnie Neubauer book, The Write Brain Workbook. Love it as much as Take Ten For Writers. The prompt was to write about a prank that was either pulled on you or one that you pulled on someone. I probably shouldn’t admit that I’m either this cruel or gullible, but I hope you enjoy it!

Looking back, the prank that my friends and I played on one of my suitemates my freshman year in college was a little cruel because it took advantage of the fact that she wasn’t exactly the brightest bulb in the pack. On the other hand, it really was funny in a twisted sort of way. I don’t even remember how we got to talking about cows, but one of my suitemates convinced Darcy that cows in Harrisonburg were genetically engineered to have two long legs and two short legs. I chimed in that it was so they wouldn’t fall off the sides of the mountains and I somehow managed to say that with a straight face. We went back and forth on this for a few minutes until she realized that we were full of it. Needless to say, she wasn’t too happy with us, but I still count it as one of my many priceless college memories.

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I was the victim of a prank in college that was absolutely hysterical both then and now. It was my senior year (way back in 1997) and my friends and I were watching The XFiles in my room. Someone had turned the lights off and we were talking about our favorite episodes; that was back when the shows were still pretty creepy and I think we all were kind of freaked out. My purse picked a particularly spooky moment to fall off the closet shelf and made a loud thump. One of my friends told me she thought something was in the closet, and of course I had to go look. When I did, one of my suitemates came up behind me and yelled “boo!” I didn’t see that coming so I squealed and jumped about 10 feet. Needless to say, that proved how gullible I am, but we got a good laugh out of it, and it still makes me laugh to think about it today.

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One of the best pranks I ever witnessed happened in 2009. I had travelled to the UMass/Old Dominion football game with my husband and afterward, I had to get a ride to the airport with the sports information director, the athletic director in charge of facilities, and a media intern. It was about 12:30 a.m. and we had suffered a crushing defeat and we were all just completely wiped out. We didn’t want to talk about the game so out of nowhere, John (the SID) started talking about grits and how they grow on trees. He’s from North Carolina and has the kind of accent that can convince a person of anything, so I can’t totally say the intern was a gullible kid; in his defense, he was worn out and had probably never been any further south than Hartford. You could just see the gears turning in his head as he tried to picture this, especially when John mentioned that you harvest grits by shaking the trees. I was so tired that anything would have been funny, but it was all I could do not to completely lose it. Finally, I felt bad enough for the kid that I told him grits come from corn and John was full of it. I hate to say it, but every time I see John, even five years later, I have to force myself not to call him “grit boy.”